On the Town with Stuart Henderson

When Stuart Henderson was a child, his grandparents, who lived in Ottawa, kept a condo near the corner of Cumberland Street and Avenue Road, in the heart of tony Yorkville.

“The concept of Yorkville as ‘cool’ was never something that was on my radar,” Henderson says, walking down Cumberland on a recent Tuesday morning. “I knew Yorkville as money.”

For those under the age of, say, 40, Yorkville has always been the city’s affluent epicentre. But it wasn’t always so. Yorkville was a hippie enclave during a brief but important spell in the 1960s, a countercultural stomping ground for artists and musicians alike. In his new book, Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s, Henderson looks at what made the neighbourhood hip to hippies, anathema to upstanding citizens, what led to its eventual transformation and its lasting legacy.

“Culturally, I can’t even begin to enumerate the ways in which this countercultural
movement in Yorkville changed the cultural face of Toronto,” Henderson says.
A local journalist and musician who wrote the book for his PhD dissertation, Henderson, 33, grew up in Lytton Park, a self-described “hippie-kid teenager” who was ignorant of Yorkville’s place in the city’s history until he began noticing that some of his favourite musicians, such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, had started out in the neighbourhood’s legendary coffee houses. Few reminders of this Shangri-La remain: Walking east down Yorkville Avenue, Henderson passes upscale clothing boutiques and over-priced restaurants; the skeleton of the new Four Seasons hotel and condo rises at the end of the street — earlier this week, its penthouse sold for $28-million, a Canadian record for a condominium sale.

“This was just coffee house after coffee house,” explains Henderson, who is decked out in jeans and a black Western shirt, his eyes hidden behind a pair of aviators, stopping just short of Hazelton Avenue.

“The north side of Yorkville, all the way along. It’s astounding how many of them there were. I mean it’s absolutely out of proportion with almost any club scene I can think of in Toronto ever since, except for perhaps the Entertainment District.”

Recognizing that coffee houses were attracting a less than savoury clientele, Toronto City Council tried to ban them — shades of Ossington Avenue four decades later. Explains Henderson: “The public outcry over Yorkville in the ’60s, and over what it was becoming — what it had become and, this is probably the key, what it was doing to young people — was so loud and so oppressive that it was impossible to deny. So Yorkville had to change, and it had to change fast.” None are left, save for the Coffee Mill, which opened in 1963, and which Henderson hesitates to compare to other, more famous hangouts.

“You go in there, you get a piece of cake, a cup of coffee. You don’t really feel like Allen Ginsberg.”

The legacy of Yorkville has lasted far, far longer than its heyday, which was only about six years, says Henderson, who is currently working on a “sequel” about nearby Rochdale College. Now, the only reminder of a place like the Bohemian Embassy is the condo on Queen Street West that has appropriated its name.

“I get my haircut in York-ville, so it still serves a purpose for me,” Henderson says. “And Hemingway’s isn’t the worst place to have a beer. But obviously if I’m going to go try find the next great rock band, or the next great artist, I’m not looking in these galleries, and I’m not looking in these clubs.”